Chome OS... De Google val slaat dicht

Much fuzz about the announcement of the Google Chrome OS the past few days.

I must say that I am intrigued by the concept myself. My first reaction was like "Off course, after the Google Apps, Chrome Browser and Android this is the next step".

Google is revealing itself more and more like the other established players as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc. They are actually building a stack of software and platforms that lock in any company that is standardising on their software.

Google is more and more becoming a "normal" IT-company that sells software and tries to bind customers to their solutions.
There are 3 aspects to this issue:

1. Google still is a company that gets it's revenues from advertising
2. Google is starting to dominate (monopoly??) some markets (advertising)
3. Google is known for giving away free services

I wonder where this is going... Google is not the David fighting Goliath with small stones anymore. They are a David on steroids trying to get Achilles and Goliath at the same time.

Read more about this topic:

• With the Chrome OS, Google's software stack is revealed; Shrapnel everywhere
• With OS project, is Google over-extending itself?

Boost for Open Source Search through availability of connectors

Just read the Blog post on Beyond Search about the fact that ISYS is letting its connector technology be reselled by Lucid Imagination.

According to Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination, "The combination of ISYS File Readers and Lucene/Solr offers a best-of-breed solution for enterprises that do not want to be held back by lack of functionality and the high costs associated with proprietary search products from infrastructure and platform vendors."

It is clear that Enterprise Search is all about the connectors, as stated in many articles and blog posts earlier. The lack of connectability of Solr/Lucene has, up till now, held back the large scale adaption of the open source platform.

I think this is very good news.

Google announces the 6.0 version of the GSA, Search experts are not impressed

Today Google announced the release of the 6.0 version of their Search Appliance
The main improvements are

• better scalability
  The Box can now hold up to 30 million documents and can be connected to more appliances to hold billions of documents
  
• Flexible architecture
  It is easier to connect more appliances
• Social Search capabilities
  Add page to result.
  

Some excerpts from other sources:

http://www.itworld.com/software/68712/google-search-appliance-now-can-index-billions-documents

In addition, GSA 6.0 provides end users with social search capabilities, such as the ability for them to add results.

"Google has matured in its thinking about how enterprises implement search," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research.

Enhancing the Search Appliance in areas like scale, customization and integration will resonate positively in the enterprise market, where Google's main challenge is being perceived primarily as a consumer-focused company, Wettemann said.

While the Search Appliance's functionality isn't still as sophisticated as that of high-end products from Autonomy and Microsoft's Fast Search, it has moved upstream with this latest round of enhancements, said IDC analyst Susan Feldman.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/02/google-enterprise-search-technology-cio-network-google.html

Forrester Research analyst Matthew Brown says the product improvements may be as dramatic as Google says they are. But taken in context, Google is still trying to play catch-up to a slew of start-ups and giants like Oracle, he says.

"I'm just kind of unimpressed with what they're announcing," says Brown. "They're coming to market so late, with requirements that were established years and years ago."

federated search redefined... more like distributed indexing

Through Linked-In I was pointed to a blog about a new kind of search or another way that the term "federated search" could be defined.

“The triumph of the distributed Web.” He said the aggregate power of distributed human activity will trump centralized control. His main point was that Google, and other search engines that analyze the Web and links, are much less useful than a (theoretical) search engine that knows not what people have linked to (as Google does), but rather what pages are open on people’s browsers at the moment that people are searching. “All the problems of search would be solved if search relevance was ranked by what browsers were displaying,” he said.

source: http://federatedsearchblog.com/2009/05/27/a-new-paradigm-for-federated-search/

I like the idea but I am confused about the fact that they are calling this "federated search".

In the enterprise search world we define "Federated search" as the distribution of a search action over two or more search environments. The "distributed" engines deliver results and those results are aggregated by the centralized search engine and presented to the user.

I think it would be more appropriate to name the mentioned method of indexing "distributed indexing" or "federated indexing".

Enterprise search will never be able to search the enterprise

http://dominicfallows.co.uk/2009/05/14/it-is-getting-too-clever-by-half/

Users of enterprise search technologies report that the enterprise will never be searchable ­ – there is just too much private (and valuable) information sitting on PCs and in obscure systems that use strange data formats. Service-oriented architectures typically fail to provide services and degrade into expensive mechanisms for providing limited interoperability between systems. And so on.

I am sure that there is some organisation somewhere that lives up to the glossy images we find in supplier brochures ­ – where everything is under control, and senior management look on approvingly as some smart, attractive, thirty-something professionals adjust a few parameters in the business performance management system. It's just that I've never come across such a thing ­ – and neither will you.

I must disagree with the author on this. Of course it is a challenge to make all data in an organization searchable. With the current indexing and search tools like Autonomy or Google most problems and obscure data formats can be handled. The experience that we have is that there a very few organizations that have a vision on that field.

Google add a page to a result

I didn't know that this feature existed.
You can add a page that you missed in de result to the result page of a specific query.

Another brilliant idea from the boys of Google. This way you collect "best results" with the direct input from (active) users.
A similar functionality is the "SearchWiki" which let you add comments to pages in the results that are return by a query.

Rediscovery of Yahoo Search

Because of all the default settings in IE (Microsoft Live Search) and Firefox (Google Search) it is simple to forget that there is another good search engine that has been around from the "beginning of the WWW as we know it": Yahoo! search.
The strange thing is that what Microsoft does with IE and Livesearch, Mozilla is doing with Firefox and Google. Of course you can change your default search provider, but not everybody knows that and (wants to) use that.

Because of this blog about the good search suggestions that Yahoo! gives, I started to rediscover Yahoo!.
It has a nice clean interface and the results are much more relevant than the search with Live Search. The added "Search assist" is very powerfull and fast.

For some time now I want to use something else than the all-seeing Google. Understand me well: I have nothing against Google, I just think it is good to look at something else in stead of using something because everyone is using it.